Oxford City is really finding itself out on its own. It needs the district councils around it to provide non-green-belt land for housing, but is an urban council amongst rural ones, and any larger grouping will outvote the urbanites
That is exactly the core problem with our current system of local government when it comes to planning, whether housing or transport. Unless you create authority boundaries that reflect broad travel-to-work areas, you are never going to get optimal regional or local planning. It is not quite as simple as it sounds, as in many more populated regions (especially the south-east, West Midlands and parts of the industrial north) these areas overlap.
I have a feeling that one of the reasons that this nettle has never been grasped is that it suits all three established national political parties - Labour knows it can retain councils like Reading and Oxford where the old borough boundaries exclude many more prosperous suburbs and the Conservatives and Lib Dems know that the outer suburban and rural areas outside are areas they can fight over without any risk of periods when those pesky Socialists can dump all their housing on them.
We have had a much more "fit for purpose" system of dividing up the country for over 50 years - the postcode areas, which reflect lines of communications. Whether the cost of a radical shake-up of boundaries to reflect this is justified is unclear - but I think we can be sure that Rachel Reeves won't find the necessary cash.
I remain astonished (and appalled) by the current fad in government for simply adding another layer of administration by adding mayoralities on top of the current system - why do they think that setting up another office and electing a mayor will suddenly solve all problems? It will not work if it's simply aggregations of local authority areas that are largely rooted in centuries-old history that bear little relationship to current economic realities and communications network.
